The Small Penis Bible on BBC3

(Image shows me in the FREE T-Shirt the good people at T-Shirt Studio made for me.)

The conversation continues. I'm frankly amazed that mainstream media (ITV Morning, all the national papers, Radio 1 and now BBC 3) are discussing 'penis size anxiety'. This never happened when I was growing up, and it's odd to see these channels acting as a force for good!

What I especially like about this latest article, is that the conversation is clearly developing. Up to now there has been a lot of what I call "lazy click-bait headline journalism": headlines blurting out "Man with one inch penis..." (that's the relaxed state, hardly worth mentioning really); or even worse "Man with micro-penis..." (that's just not factual). In this article Natalie Ktena has listened beyond the obvious, the immediate, and at least has debunked the idea that any small penis is a micro penis. Well done Natalie.

I don't believe the concept 'micropenis' has any place in our vocabulary - it is of no practical help to anyone and acts only as a label, a judgement. I thoroughly debunk it in The Small Penis Bible. This article from BBC3 doesn't go quite that far (it's a relatively short and simple article) - but it's very cheering that at least it avoids labelling all small penises as micropenises.

There's one other area discussed that is over simplified, and somewhat misses the point. "One reason for this anxiety, Ant believes, is porn"; well no actually, that's not quite what I believe.

Porn, on the whole, is a good and necessary thing.

Porn doesn't, in itself, create penis size anxiety; the reasons why porn plays a part in exacerbating such anxiety are more fundamental. Certainly, I was deeply 'body conscious' before I ever knew what porn was. The seeds of my shame were sown at a young age. It is the relentless 'size matters' references we see on the television and the common 'small dick jokes' we share amongst ourselves that set us up for anxiety.

Then we grow up in a world where advertising and indeed pornography, fills our lives and that seed of anxiety grows. At the same time we experience less of the reality. Whilst our fantasies, and access to them, is blooming uncontrollably in our multi-screen lives - our experience of reality is shrinking. We have fewer open showers in gyms, fewer open-troughs in public conveniences, fewer real world interactions of any sort. Whilst our experience of reality diminishes, our immersion in the fantasies being sold to us increases.

Porn is not to blame for small penis anxiety, we are. The attitudes we promote and share, along with the realities we hide and shrink from, are the reasons we end up shaming ourselves. We need our fantasies, but we need our truths as well. So I do not call for any banning of porn, rather I call for more honesty to stand beside it. #smallpenispride